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Psychology in UX

When your designing muse comes calling, and you start working on your potentially award-winning app, it will come as a surprise that you need more than creativity to get your hot UX design off the board. Indeed, masters in the field cannot overemphasize the importance of psychology and UX design. User experience designs work best when they present content that a visitor to an e-commerce site can access easily and comfortably. You need to explore the subtle persuasive cues that will convince online visitors not just to come back, but also to buy.

Are psychology principles utilized appropriately in UX design?
Where’s the line between subtle nudging and outright manipulation? Many psychological principles applied to UX design are intended to be invisible to the casual observer; they are there to guide and educate. Others, however, are designed to trick you into taking a route you may regret.

Accessibility

As UX designers, we have a lot on our plates. The term “UX Unicorn” exists for a reason. We are responsible for our clients’ goals as well as our users’ needs. You might ask then, why should you think about Accessibility in your UX Design process?
Imagine going into a design workshop and telling your client that you need more hours to make his or her company website accessible. You’ll need a good use case to convince your client and maybe even yourself that accessibility should feature in the UX Design process. Here, we will look at the social need of why you should design with accessibility in mind.

Human Cognition

In one of my previous articles I wrote about ways to design for human attention. Attention is closely linked with working and short-term memory. However, this article is going to be focused on the entire human memory system. We have two main types of memory: short-term memory (STM) and long-term memory (LTM). In computer science terms, you might imagine short-term memory as RAM and long-term as the HDD. I will try to describe how they work, how we can design interfaces that eliminate confusion and how to lower the cognitive effort users need to make. All of this should result in a more human-centered user experience.

There is one principle of organization that every human should adhere to, particularly people who design products. Day after day, I see companies break this rule, and it is 100% of the time to their detriment. In this article I will explain what that rule is, and what it means to product and service design. I’ll also raise the possible implications of this phenomenon on organizational management, collaboration, and general performance. The psychological phenomenon I will be discussing in this article is known as Miller’s Law. Rather than just tell you what Miller’s Law is, I ask you to take part in this exercise for a more immersive learning lesson.

Human, AI and UX

The addition of AI capabilities to our personal devices, applications, and even self-driving cars has caused us to take a much deeper look at what we call ‘User Experience’ (Ux). A more analytical framework identified as Cognitive Ergonomics is becoming an important field for data scientists to understand and implement.

Books and Resources 📖

Today it’s simply not good enough to have visually appealing content, websites or apps. You need to take things a step further to persuade your users to take action. The trick here is subtlety. And the way to achieving that is to prompt them to take the actions you want them to without them realizing it. The first thing that you might be thinking is: “oh that sounds very dark”, but there are psychological theories that you can use to improve your persuasive communication and thereby, make your UXD more persuasive. We’ve compiled a list of 8 books that can teach you more about persuasion and its role in user’s decision-making and behaviors. Hopefully, you’ve either already read or will read these books and create a more persuasive user experience.